Statement on recent media stories on payment frauds

Recently there were articles published in LiveMint, Lokmat Times, Hindustan Times and a few other publications, which cited Mr.Pavan Duggal, cybercrime expert, claiming there was a widespread scam using PhonePe and GooglePay. The articles are widely misleading, because they suggest that a user’s KYC details get shared during transactions. As noted by Pavan Duggal himself, as an addition to one of the article, ‘There is nothing wrong with PhonePe or Google Pay transactions.”

However, these articles go on to state that if a user pays a fraudster money via apps like PhonePe and GooglePay, the fraudster can dig up your KYC details. We do not believe this to be true because when a user links their bank account on a UPI app, the bank does not pass on the KYC information, and we do not have any user sensitive details to begin with. Therefore, there is no risk of any data either leaking or a fraudster being able to reverse engineer any data shared during a transaction. The only information available to a receiver is the transaction amount, the UTR number and the sender’s name. The articles do not detail how these can be used to dig up the PAN and bank account details.

We believe UPI is a perfectly safe way of transferring money and these articles are creating false concerns in the minds of Indian consumers.